Artist curator Ian White’s new Berlin blog: Crowd control

Ian White
Berlin sex shop window, August 2009. Photo by Ian White

 

Where do we find our mirrors?

I’d been to ‘the building’ twice before, most recently in March for one of Jan Verwoert’s hugely popular lectures. He talked about the ‘object petit a’, something to do with all the things we desire and never attain, or lose, or are subject to an unbearable feedback loop, illustrated (yes) by the film roles of the French actor Alain Delon. There was something of the 19th century in the peculiar fervour around these lectures that was no less eroticized than by Verwoert’s art-thinker magnetism, Wildean locks and his repetition of the supposition this night that we are here to ‘fuck and die… to fuck and die… to fuck and die’ as if such a situation was a concept.

Right, then, that A and I together should trot down and dance around ‘the building’s final hours a couple of weeks ago, struggling ‘midst the throng of spikey kitten heels, crumpled polyester triangles that they call dresses and pot holes on the scrubby bit of grass where jungen talked curatorial while the Old Guard shuffled round so as to be noted as such by virtue of their jeans and the shabby summer jackets of social status. Actually we’d come to see Hans Ulrich Obrist talk with Elena Filipovic about Walter Hopps but managed first to squeeze a glimpse (from the doorway) of Buckminster Fuller talking to a group of hippies in San Francisco in 1968 on a video presented by Sepake Angiama – great until it ended and a group participation exercise was starting. I went outside and crouched in the gutter next to the hotdog stand.

We were joined by K and tramped back up the stairs that were lined with snapshots of all the other happy ‘building’ events over its three years of existence (curators looking gawky, drunk, celebratory, free and alive, more real than reality). We’d missed the start of the Obrist slot. The room was more full than packed. Somewhere in there they were speaking – not that we could hear them – behind this trembling solid wall of people that blocked the view. So here it was, the final event as a perfect image of itself. Perfect. It, them, me, us. A, K and I looked at each other and we knew we’d found the thing we came for in a better form than we could have imagined: utterly exterior. Phew. We left and went for a drink at a bar on Karl-Marx-Allee opposite the magnificent Kino International advertising their special weekly night for homosexuals: ‘Mongay’ featuring Steve McQueen’s Hunger on 14th September. Hello/goodbye Berlin.

I wonder if you are almost always singular in the face of the plural on a residency (which is what I am doing here, as an artist): you in the many faces of the place to which you’ve come, even when you know some of them. That’s part of what makes these things inherently challenging (I’m wondering). Similarity and difference. I did not see myself in ‘Creature Feature #2’ – the queer performance event at Basso presented by Jeremy Wade (whom I otherwise dutifully love) – feeling cajoled and barracked as the body of an audience owned by the organizer. I left halfway through a gorgeous half-naked Belgian dancer’s growling prowl, after seeing Anne de Vries’ all-nude neo-modernist review ornament enter that included a fat man laying on the floor making farting noises before he stood up with a physically ‘perfect’ blond girl on his shoulders, straddling his face. If only ‘Where did otherness go?’ wasn’t just a question posed by the event’s promotional material. Where indeed…

During the first Freaky Film Club on Friday 28 August (curated by Karin Michalski as part of the Freaky Queer Art Conference organized by Renate Lorenz) the American photographer Zoe Leonard described her series of photographs of the head of a bearded lady preserved in a bell jar in a medical college at the University of Paris which appears as an image in Lorenz and Pauline Boudry’s concise and actually moving video N.O. Body (2008). These five different-sized photographs of the same person-made-object are hung along her and the viewer’s eye line. Simply, she is many and the viewer is one. The freak show equation is reversed. Not so for the videos in this programme which generally featured single individuals in their idiosyncracy, speaking out from positions that challenged for sure, but that were also applauded by the full auditorium of the former dancehall at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse as if these ones stood for us, the many. In so doing they became a question about the radical potential of affiliation, if it has any, about exactly how challenges might be posed, who is speaking: where, to whom, how, me?

Among the afternoons of lectures from academics Robert McRuer, Elisabeth Lebovici, Catherine Lord and Kobena Mercer on pre-selected artworks by Latifah Echakhch, Rashawn Griffin, Nao Bustamante and Ines Doujak chosen by Lorenz, and the second film programme on Saturday evening there were some moments of genuine arrest despite the interrogation and inscription (or reclaiming) of this term ‘freaky’ feeling strangely unnecessary. Catherine Lord gave a bravura performance to ‘seduce’ Ines Doujak from the platform: ‘I like women and the decorative aspects of their reproductive systems’. In Ulrike Müller’s video Mock Rock (2004) the artist variously positions herself on and around a rock in an industrial zone in Queens, New York, referencing Valie Export’s body-architecture alignments of the late 1970s while on the soundtrack we hear her voice singing Simon and Garfunkel’s I am a Rock. I’ve seen this video before but never quite heard the sound like I heard it in this place, with this audience. Müller’s voice was crystal clear, so unimaginably tender, absolutely present, cutting through air, all other material, speakers, screen, space, absolutely directly to what I am going to allow myself to say was there and then the heart. Incredible. Immaculate enough to warrant the final line of Frank O’Hara’s poem The Day Lady Died, that is beautiful to the extent that ‘everyone and I stopped breathing’ until I couldn’t help but inhale to shout ‘Bravo!’ and really we should have all been standing if we were not weeping.

Am I only looking for an image of myself? I do not know if I found any more of myself-as-other here, or even if I am other anyway, but what the Freaky Queer Art Conference provided was a rich accumulation of thought, a set of ideas about work/s and the deliberately planned structure of the event itself (and such events in general) as material form and the chance for a rare kind of commonality.


Ian White is an artist and Adjunct Film Curator for the Whitechapel Gallery, London, as well as working on independent projects. He is the Facilitator of the LUX Associate Artists Programme and a writer. He curated ‘Tense Present’, a guided tour of artists’ film and video in the Luxonline collection.

the building, a three-year project by e-flux, held its final events on 25-26 September 2009.

Kino International

Basso

Freaky Queer Art Conference

Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz

 

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